Archeology and Mathematics: Dante in the 19th Century

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From 1600­–1800, interest in Dantean cartography waned. Maps of this period were mostly rehashed sixteenth-century illustrations. Fascination with the poem’s geography returned in the mid-nineteenth century, as demonstrated by an outburst of fully-illustrated volumes, paintings and wood panels representing the Comedy’s geography. Along with this proliferation of visual interpretations came a renewal of old debates among Dante scholars about the precise mathematics of the otherworld.

Similar to their sixteenth-century predecessors, nineteenth-century authors collaborated with publishers and artists to experiment with emerging technologies in the print medium including chromolithography (1, 2). After it was first published in 1855, the central map of the earth served as the basis for many subsequent maps and debates in scholarly circles. Ten years later, professor Francesco Gregoretti commissioned an album of large plates of the Comedy (3, 4, 5) for the six-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s birth. The Purgatorio illustrations, and in particular the close up view of the Garden of Eden, resemble archeological surveys or urban plans. The strata, plans and diagrams perhaps sought to add scientific veracity to the image in the way that the spatial modeling of Fortunato Lanci’s “synoptic” illustrations seem to do as well (6).

This hyper-scientific approach to mapping the Comedy was emblematic of mid-nineteenth century Italian scholarship. One professor commented, “The desire to reconcile Dante’s construction with the real laws of gravity is impossible: According to those laws Dante’s Inferno could not exist.” To add insult to injury, he republished one of the maps of his rivals, seen here, to point out its flaws and argue that such modern mapping “could not have possibly been imagined” by Dante’s earliest commentators (7). These discussions may provide a context for the “Dante Chronograph” (8). By moving the position of the sun and moon, the viewer can pinpoint the hours and location of Dante’s journey and its position in relation to the globe and the stars.

Many of the nineteenth-century maps were printed in scholastic editions of the poem (9), indicating the primary purpose was pedagogical, much like editions of the poem that we read today. From our contemporary standpoint, we must reconstruct the incendiary nature of the debate that once surrounded them. Maps enable us to think about how these supposedly objective diagrams shape our interpretation of the Comedy’s cosmography — and are perhaps not so neutral after all.